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Taiwanese computer peripheral manufacturer Asus, known for its ROG-series (Republic of Gamers) notebooks, on May 7 introduced a new budget-oriented TUF FX504 notebook, along with the Intel Core i9 processor-based flagship ROG G703 notebook, in India. While the TUF FX504 is aimed at casual gamers, the ROG G703 with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card is designed for more serious ones.

The FX504 sports a 15.6-inch full HD LCD display with a 120Hz refresh rate and comes in a plastic body with a brushed-aluminium look, which is built on the lines of Asus's “quad bladed” three-dimensional design. It is identical to the higher-range ROG series of laptops. The laptop features a red back-lit membrane keyboard, which is rated for up to 20 million key presses according to Asus.

The laptop felt comfortable for casual to hardcore gaming. The touchpad, on the other hand, felt sufficient for gameplay and carried out the windows 10 gestures easily. In my brief time with the machine, it performed pretty well and had no performance issues while I destroyed an army of Dire faction in Dota 2.

Asus TUF FX504 comes in a number of configurations; one can choose from the latest 8th gen Intel Core i5-8300H or 8th gen Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB Firecuda Hybrid HDD along with 128GB SSD drive, and 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti graphics card with full Microsoft DirectX 12 support. The essential ports such as the USB 3.1, USB 2.0, and an HDMI 1.4 port are located on the left panel of the laptop.

The laptop weighs only 2.30 kg and is comparatively thin when compared to other gaming laptops but all said and done, the laptop runs out of power after only 2hrs of continuous use and can be annoying for many who wants hassle-free gaming for more than 2hrs.

The TUF FX504 comes in three variants priced between Rs 69,990 and Rs 89,990 depending on the configurations.

"ROG G703" sports a mammoth 17.3-inch FHD IPS display with 144Hz high refresh rate, up to 130% sRGB colour gamut with NVIDIA G-SYNC support to ensure seamless graphical output, be it for gaming or video editing.

The device is powered by an overclockable Intel Core i9-8950HK processor, capable of a stable overclock of up to a speed of 4.8GHz and is paired with 64GB of DDR4 memory available in 4 slots of 16GB each.

The laptop's graphical properties are powered by an 8GB GDDR5X VRAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics and comes with a 2TB Firecuda Hybrid Hard Disk Drive combined with 512GB SSD of storage. With such firepower at stake, the G703 crunches away almost everything graphical thrown seamlessly. The metal design with a glowing eagle-eye logo on the back adds to the appeal of the laptop while the design language inside is familiar with the other ROG laptops available in the market. The RGB back-lit keyboard with per-key RGB customisation and fairly large touchpad seemed familiar to the existing line up. Asus also provided seven hotkeys for volume control, toggling mic control, ASUS Gaming Centre, AURA lighting, XBOX app, and for webcam at the top of the keyboard. The G703 comes with a three USB 3.1 Type-A ports and a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port, which also doubles up as a Thunderbolt 3.0 port.

The laptop is a run-it-all gaming console that carried out games starting from Rise of the Tomb Raider to Forza Motorsport 7 flawlessly during the few moments we spent with it and the sheer presence of colours on screen overwhelmed us extensively.

The cooling system also works well and handles the hard-core gaming with ease but one may feel a steady gust of hot wind from the left exhaust vent while using a mouse.

The G703 is a laptop that every gamer would love to have in his kitty but given the weight of 4.7Kg and a price tag of Rs 4,99,990, the dream of us average gamers can never be achieved.

Note: We do not know much about the audio capabilities of both TUF FX504 and G703 in detail as of now, we will have to wait for a full review of the machines in order to get a glimpse of the audio in these machines.